Freek.dev

Laravel / PHP / AI

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Good Product Team / Bad Product Team

Marty Cagan, who held jobs at eBay, AOL, Netscape and HP, describes the most important differences between good and bad product teams.

What I’ve learned is that there is a profound difference between how the very best product companies create technology products, and the rest. And I don’t mean minor differences. Everything from how the leaders behave, to the level of empowerment of teams, to how the organization thinks about funding, staffing and producing products, down to how product, design and engineering collaborate to discover effective solutions for their customers.

http://svpg.com/good-product-team-bad-product-team/

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Typehint all the things

David Négrier, CTO of the CodingMachine, wrote a nice article on why he likes and how his team uses typehints.

As a developer consuming this function, I know how to use it. And if I’m using it wrong, I’ll know right away because PHP will crash with a nice error message when the function is called rather than with a cryptic error some time later.

https://www.thecodingmachine.com/type-hint-all-the-things/

Personally I like typehints too, because the potential readability improvement the article touches upon.

Note: (I only include this paragraph because it's mentioned in the intro of the article, don't want to stir up a discussion) the fuzz about that "Visual Debt" video was overblown. Even though I didn't agree with all of it, it was nice to hear Jeffrey's way of thinking.

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Easily optimize images using PHP (and some binaries) original

by Freek Van der Herten – 7 minute read

Our recently released image-optimizer package can shave off some kilobyes of PNGs, JPGs, SVGs and GIFs by running them through a chain of various image optimization tools. In this blog post I'll tell you all about it. First, here's a quick example on how you can use it: use…

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HTTP Tools Roundup

Curl is not your only tool when creating or testing out APIs. On her blog Lorna Jane Mitchell made a nice list of alternatives.

At a conference a few days ago, I put up a slide with a few of my favourite tools on it. I got some brilliant additional recommendations in return from twitter so I thought I'd collect them all in one place in case anyone is interested - all these tools are excellent for anyone working APIs (so that's everyone!).

https://lornajane.net/posts/2017/http-tools-roundup

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A list of podcasts original

by Freek Van der Herten – 2 minute read

On his blog Left On The Web, Stefan Koopmanschap lists the podcasts he's listening to. His selection contains both tech and non-tech podcasts.

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A programmer's cognitive load

Brent Roose wrote down his thoughts around how things like fonts, spacing, docblock, ... can influence the cognitive load of a programmer.

As a professional programmer, I'm reading and writing code on a daily basis. I'm working on new projects, doing code reviews, working with legacy code, learning documentation etc. Based on my own experience and that of colleagues, being a programmer often involves a lot more reading than actually writing code. Whether it's your own code or that of others, when you open a file, you have to take it all in. You need to wrap your head around what's going on, before you're able to write your code. Doing this day by day, it's important to find ways to make this process easy. To try and reduce this cognitive load as much as possible. Streamlining the way you take in code, will allow you to not only work faster and better; but also improve your mental state and mood.

https://www.stitcher.io/blog/a-programmers-cognitive-load

Visual debt is real.

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Easily convert webpages to images using PHP original

by Freek Van der Herten – 4 minute read

Browsershot is a package that can easily convert any webpage into a image. Under the hood the conversion is made possible new headless options in Chrome 59. In this post I'd like to show you how you can use Browsershot v2. Here's a quick example of how it can be used:…

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Exposing Multiple Vue Components as a Plugin

In a new post on his blog Sebastian De Deyne, JavaScript (and all-round) wizard at Spatie, describes a technique to expose Vue components as a plugin.

We recently published a tabs package. Initially, users needed to register two components in order to create a tabular interface: Tabs, which acts as a container, and Tab, which defines a single tab and its contents in the interface.

Since developers are most likely going to use both components together, and there's a fair chance that they'd want to register them globally like in the example, it made sense to provide some sort of auto-install option.

https://sebastiandedeyne.com/posts/2017/exposing-multiple-vue-components-as-a-plugin

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Insights into Laravel package design

On the Bugsnag blog, Graham Campbell, wrote a guest post on the basics of creating a Laravel package. If you've ever wanted to create a package, this is a good starting point.

Laravel is a massively influential PHP framework, and its simple but powerful design means that it’s easy to utilize packages in your application. In this blog post we will look at the basics of creating and installing Laravel packages.

https://blog.bugsnag.com/designing-laravel-packages/

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Using non-breakable spaces in test method names

Mattieu Napoli shows how you can use non breaking spaces to make long test function names more readable.

Yes. This article is about using non-breakable spaces to name tests. And the fact that it’s awesome. And why you should use them too.

public function test a user can add a product to a wishlist() { // ... }

The code above is valid PHP code and works. Non-breaking spaces (aka   in HTML) look like spaces in editors but are actually interpreted like any other character by PHP.

http://mnapoli.fr/using-non-breakable-spaces-in-test-method-names/

It's cool that it works, but I'm not really a fan of this. I very much prefer how test runners like jest go about this by passing the name of the test to a function so you can use spaces.

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What is snapshot testing, and is it viable in PHP?

In a new blogpost at Sitepoint Christopher Pitt talks about snapshot testing. He first explains how snapshot testing can help test React components. Then he demonstrates how you can use our home grown package to use snapshot testing in PHP. Finally he shows pretty cool use cases for snapshot tests.

Ah-ha moments are beautiful and rare in programming. Every so often, we’re fortunate enough to discover some trick or facet of a system that forever changes how we think of it.

For me, that’s what snapshot testing is.

You probably write a lot of PHP code, but today I want to talk about something I learned in JavaScript. We’ll learn about what snapshot testing is and then see how it can help us write better PHP applications.

https://www.sitepoint.com/snapshot-testing-viable-php/

If you want know more about snapshot testing, check out this blogpost by my colleague Sebastian, or watch this video where I refactor some tests to use snapshots.

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